#145： The Happiness Industry With William Davies
Episode Stats
Summary
William Davies is the author of the book The Happiness Industry: How Big Business and Government Sold Us Well-Being, and why being happy might not be such a great thing after all. In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, I sit down with author William Davies to discuss his new book, "The Happiness Industry" and discuss why being happier might not always be a good thing.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so in the past
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10 years there's been this increasing emphasis on happiness there's tons of books written about it
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blogs are dedicated to how to be happier and you're even seeing corporations becoming interested
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in tracking the happiness and well-being of their employees and instituting programs to increase
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their happiness governments are also getting in on the the act they're developing algorithms
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to track the happiness of their citizens and on the surface this sounds great right like that's
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awesome that companies and governments want us to be happy but my guest today on the podcast makes
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the nuanced case that maybe we should this should give us some pause his name is William Davies he's
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the author of the book the happiness industry how the government and big business sold us well-being
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and in the book he makes gives us a history of tracking happiness which began all the way back
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in the 1780s and has advanced throughout the centuries to what we have today where you have
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devices that you can put on your brain that can actually track your mood moment to moment and even
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devices that can change your mood moment to moment while there's some benefits to that it should give
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us some pause because what it's happening what's happening is that it's beginning to have the market
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encroach into areas of our life that we never thought would be part of the market talking about
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family friends religion spirituality it's all geared towards tying happiness to dollar signs at least
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that's the case he makes so the thing on the podcast we're going to discuss this i thought it was really
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interesting as someone who's really got his ear to the ground all this psychological research about
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happiness and well-being great counterpoint a different perspective so without further ado
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william davies the happiness industry will davies welcome to the show thank you all right so your
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book is called the happiness industry how big business and government sold us well-being and the
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reason why i want to have you on the show to talk about this book because it takes on a topic that i've
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been thinking a lot about lately and this idea everywhere you go blog posts magazine articles news
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shows about it's all about how to be happy how to increase your well-being and it's kind of i'm sure
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i'm sort of drawn to it at one hand but the other time i'm the other hand sort of repulsed by it um
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that i'm told that you need to be happy uh i don't know i guess the rebel in me rebel in me doesn't like
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that uh in your book you sort of take on and uh critique what do you what do you call the happiness
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industry before we get into why being happy might not be such a great thing or what rephrase that
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uh having businesses being so interested in us being happy is not such a great thing can you
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explain what you mean by the happiness industry sure and i have similar feelings about this as you
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do in that i think a society or a workplace that cares about our feelings is clearly a good thing
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you don't want to live in a society that is indifferent to people's feelings you don't want to
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be surrounded by managers or businesses that don't care about their impact on on people's
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minds and their feelings and so on but i was drawn to this topic in a similar way in that it struck me
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that some on the face of what were quite noble um ethical impulses and agendas seem to be co-opted in
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certain ways by marketing by um management by certain areas of government policy and i think
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what's key here is the role of measurement and the role of economics and particularly in the last
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20 years i would say uh the happiness and emotions have become a very hot topic in economics uh in
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neuroscience particularly at the moment in a to a growing extent in areas of computer science and
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what's called affective computing which develops various techniques for trying to read the emotions
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of people via the movements of their faces or their eyes or the the behavior of their brains and
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whatever it might be and what's happened as a result of these advances in particular areas of
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social science and behavioral science and medical science is that certain interests in society
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particularly those of corporations but also um those who are trying to come up with more efficient
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ways of delivering public services or health services or whatever it might be or ways of trying to
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discipline certain areas of the population have used this body of knowledge and seen it as an
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opportunity to either make money or to cut costs or to try and change the way people behave so i think
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it's particularly that uh co-option or that um excuse the sociological language but that instrumentalization
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of um ethical and political and cultural ideals uh in pursuit of uh rather more cynical agendas that i
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would term the happiness industry okay so this this includes uh things like wearable tech uh fitbits
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um yeah and i guess there's even now there's technology i have a few pieces of this technology where
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you can put a band around your head and it can read brain waves and tell you if you are focused or if
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you are calm um yeah what are some other you can actually try to influence your feelings that way as
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well yeah i just saw that just came out i just i've been seeing ads for this thing it's a device you
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you stick to the side of your head and it can make you feel energized or calm right you know i guess
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they i guess they use electricity to do that yeah i mean i don't understand the technology there's one
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called numitra i think which does something like that yeah and i guess uh you're seeing more
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corporations uh include things like mindfulness training like they're encouraging their employees
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to meditate uh there's nap rooms now a lot of businesses have mat nap rooms so you know on the
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faces he's like well it's great you know that the businesses are doing this um but you make the case
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in your book that in a in a strange way they've actually created this problem like they're doing this
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to to make us more productive it's not just to be nice like they want to get more out of us
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yes i think businesses have been interested in in feelings and happiness for a long time and one of
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the things that i try to do in the book is to not just tell the the more recent story which i i outlined
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very briefly just now but to also put this in the in the longer context businesses have been interested
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in psychology and um emotions since at least the 1920s and in the workplace with the rise of the
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what we now call human resources um there has been concern to try and talk to employees in the right
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way and so on and to make sure they feel good about themselves it's quite a long history because
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it's known that this has an impact on their productivity i think what one of the things that
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the happiness science of the last 20 or 25 years has changed is that people can now put dollar signs
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on that extra productivity or or on those on those emotions um so some of the happiness economists
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have calculated that a happy employee is 12 percent more productive than an unhappy employee i mean these
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these kind of calculations vary um the opinion polling company gallop does all of this research on what
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they call employee engagement um which suggests that less than a third of the uh workforce in
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countries like the united states are fully psychologically engaged in their work and that this is costing
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hundreds of billions of dollars a year uh to the u.s economy and i don't question the evidence as such
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what i i think one of the dangers with this type of evidence is that it does create rather a cynical
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approach which doesn't try to which which looks to in a sense change the symptom
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rather than look at the cause so if it is true that employees are stressed or unhappy or disengaged
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one of the problems with trying to put dollar signs on those problems is that immediately people get
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drawn to just trying to deal with the the symptom they just try to say well how can we kind of just
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sort of you know re-energize people you know what do we need to do do we need to give them free lunch
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do we need to give them uh free gym membership do we need to kind of track their behavior using a
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a wearable uh or do we just kind of i mean one of the stories i heard when i was um talking about
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the book in philadelphia a couple of months ago was someone in the audience told me that um he worked
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in a casino there where employees were required to dance to pharrell williams is happy with the
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manager once a week and you know start the week with a kind of you know pep everybody up and get
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them going uh now this kind of thing clearly is going to yield its own uh negative forms of of
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of cynicism of further psychological disengagement um human beings are not lab rats they can't just
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have their their their psychology or their behavior tweaked purely by some kind of you know slight
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tweaking of the environment i think that the question of how to produce fulfilling work is a is a serious
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one but that also requires businesses and managers to engage in some some rather more complicated
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questions about the extent to which people are able to kind of fit work around the rest of their lives
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or the extent to which people can um have genuine time off or or the extent to which people have a
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say in how they go about their work um the sorts of areas where a lot of this happiness science is being
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put to work are in areas like call centers which are quite stressful um high surveillance environments
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where labor turnover is incredibly high because it's not enjoyable work um and the managers
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turn to the happiness science to try and find out how they can deal with these problems simply to try
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and sort of change the change the symptom change the way in which people's emotions are being
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churning around in the workplace rather than to actually question uh the nature of the work itself
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yeah that was an interesting point because i'm uh i'm a big fan of the resilient you know being
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resilient like resilience training uh learning how to uh remain calm even when things are going
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crazy around you but at the same time i always had that question for folks whenever i've talked to
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people who uh are experts in resilience or whatever and say well how do how do you make things better
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right this just like puts a band-aid on the problem right how do i how do i answer how do i solve the
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problem of where i don't have to be resilient anymore for that particular thing um and i feel like
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the whole idea of just being mindful and being resilient it sort of uh puts the question of how
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to solve these problems to the side and just just deal with it we can't solve it's too big just be
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resilient you'll be okay yeah i mean i certainly i think these types of responses particularly amongst
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public policymakers these types of responses arise partly as a result of the powerlessness of of
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policymakers more generally and that they it's harder to tackle um stress uh tackle insecurity uh
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this cause the sources of anxiety and depression which it's clear from certain areas of social
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science areas such as social epidemiology and these kinds of um research areas that things like
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depression and anxiety are triggered by things in the environment to to a large extent of course they
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also have neurological and biological dimensions to them um but they uh don't just arise out of nowhere
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and it's no coincidence that they are much higher in uh the rates are much higher in in society such as
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the united states or in britain than they are in um for instance in in lots of northern european
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nations um and i think that in a way the the resort to saying in that case we need to somehow teach
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individuals to be more resilient or more mindful or or to or to look after their mental health better
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is partly um a symptom of the of political powerlessness in a way to actually challenge
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some of the forces for insecurity inequality high levels of materialism and competitiveness which are
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known to uh correlate closely to uh levels of of things like depression um and i mean you see this in
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in the school system i mean in in britain where i live um there's a great movement to try and teach
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more techniques such as happiness and resilience and so on in school and to introduce mindfulness
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into classrooms and so on um but if you look elsewhere in the education system the teachers
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suffer terrible levels of stress because they're all uh constantly being monitored and audited by the
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government pupils are all suffering terrible levels of anxiety and stress because they're constantly
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tested the whole time they never have any time off from between testing you know as soon as they
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come back from the summer holidays there's a test within a couple of weeks um so you have all of
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these kind of stress factors but no one questions the stress factors all they do is say well in that
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case we need to have more resilience training to make sure individuals can cope with this kind of
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thing but i think that at a certain point you can't just allow um mental health problems to get worse
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and worse particularly amongst children and young people uh without beginning to also question some of the
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the cultural and institutional factors that that uh trigger that so you uh you said you mentioned
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just a little bit ago that uh this uh desire of businesses uh governments to be concerned about the
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the well-being the mental well-being of their employees or their citizens uh isn't new and it goes way back
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and you make the case that the seeds of all this uh techno mindful utopia uh that we have today
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were sat were sown by the founder of utilitarianism um jeremy bentham um for our listeners who weren't
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familiar with utilitarianism can you explain what that is and and how is it that utilitarianism led to
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you know fitbits and mood trackers and things like that yeah obviously there's a there's a lot in
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between but yeah um jeremy bentham was a uh an english philosopher but he was actually a lawyer
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originally who was born in the um uh late 18th century he worked his work he worked between the
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late 18th century and the and and the uh he died i think in the 1830s um and he was a product of the
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enlightenment and he looked at things like the law and looked at politics and looked at the activities
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of the government also looked at the french revolutionaries and the american revolutionaries
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and he thought the whole all of it across whether it was conservatives or radicals that they were all
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distracted and deluded by um abstract philosophical ideas like justice or um or theological ideas like
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the divine right of kings or um revolutionaries talking about like innate human rights and this sort
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of thing people like thomas paine um and he thought that it was all basically nonsense and he thought the
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only way to put politics and law on scientific foundations was to learn from the what was going
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on in the natural sciences at the same time in chemistry and physics and elsewhere which he thought
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looked rational and coherent in a way that what was going on in the political realm and philosophy and law
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was was was kind of fueled by this nonsensical use of language and he argued that um we need to turn to
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what what is the underlying physical um underpinnings of our of our ethical uh intuitions of our ethical
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of our ethical principles and he said that the only thing that you can really found ethics on or
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politics on or any notion of justice on is the fact that all human beings have have an innate natural
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tendency to pursue pleasure and avoid pain and he meant this in quite a physical sense he didn't mean
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it in just a sort of abstract or philosophical sense he meant it in the sense that we are animals that
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are driven to to maximize our own pleasure and to avoid pain and on top of this natural theory about
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humans he constructed a theory of of utilitarianism which suggested that the only way in which
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governments could run society in any scientific sense would be to construct things in a way that
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as much pleasure was distributed as possible which amounted to what we call happiness uh and as little pain
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was generated as possible but governments could also do things like deliberately uh intervene with
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forms of pain that uh that is punishment to to change the way people behave so that you would you know
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you think of something like a speed camera or something you you know you you want people to um slow down
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in their car so you you you you create certain sort of carefully calculated interventions to try and change
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the way people behave by by by by um uh the threat of some kind of punishment so he thought that
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you could have a science of politics and he thought that um that it was this natural sense that we we we
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are we are basically um driven by our our pleasures and our pains that he thought could be the foundation
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of that politics now what i what i've argued in the book is that this belief that it's our bodies that
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really are at the are at the heart of ethics and at the heart of of politics um and that likewise that
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the the political language and the philosophical language moral language is a it's a dangerous
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distraction these are kind of key ideas in jeremy bentham's work and and i argue in the book in a
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way you can see this this same uh uh bias i suppose at work in a lot of silicon valley innovations today so
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you know so we look at something like the the apple watch or something like that and the promise of these
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technologies is that instead of us having to rely on on on what we say we're doing or what we think
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we're doing or what we tell other people we're doing or tell other people we like or whatever
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that what these things will do is to provide hard data about what our bodies uh say is going on in our
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lives so you know they will tell us how you're sleeping how much you're walking how much water
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you're drinking they say that the next generation of apple watches or in a couple of generations time
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it will tell you things about your emotions and how you're feeling um you can do forms of data
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mining on people's um text messages or that their twitter used to to to um analyze what they're
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feeling in terms of what's called sentiment analysis um so there's a similar prejudice as jeremy bentham
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had you know over 200 years ago which says stop listening to what people tell you stop uh dwelling in
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the what bentham called the tyranny of sounds people talking about oh you know i i like this i like that
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this is what i believe these are my principles and so on and get towards the science of the body
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science of choices of behavior of of physical responses and uh and uh the physical symptoms of
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emotions rather than um the the the linguistic world of of how people talk about things why is uh
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why is listen why why is listening to the body not a good way to go to figure out what people really
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want right like you know neurotransmitters are released neurons fire hormones are released to a
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particular response um i mean what would be the counter to that i mean why why listen to someone they
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say i i'm happy but then they all their their their body chemistry says well no sure i mean i i suppose
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i i think these things this is partly about balance i don't think none of this stuff is going to go
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away anytime soon and i'm not suggesting that we should just sort of you know abandon this science
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altogether but i think the problem is that a lot of the time it's firstly what it does the first
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problem with it is that it uh starts to bestow great powers upon the scientists in this situation
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and they're not necessarily scientists who work in universities with a kind of vocation to the broader
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public good or to to knowledge or something they might be scientists working in private companies who
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are effectively you know working to pursue profit which is you know what that that's the nature of
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these things is that uh the um companies that are collecting this data analyzing this data are
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doing so on their own terms a lot of the time which doesn't mean that they don't deliver benefits to
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their users and their customers but um uh there's a there's a there's a kind of a set a concentration of
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power in amongst all of this i think the the one of the problems with this is um with the way
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happiness science is going at the moment is that as companies as technology developers as scientists
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get more and more confident that they can actually see the symptoms of emotions or they can actually
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witness the emotion itself almost whether that be via a neuroscan uh or whether it be via various
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facial scanning technologies and so on is what does that happen what happens to our our own
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accounts of what's going on i mean do they do do they still matter um i mean if for instance it's
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possible to um to monitor how an entire audience is is reacting to a uh say a concert or something
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which it now is i mean this is now done i mean one of the examples in the book i i give is of at
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the literary festival in britain a couple of years ago um this smile harvesting technology was set up
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around the site to try and kind of collect data on how people were feeling from one moment to the next
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and so on so this kind of thing is already going on now does that mean that we don't need
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critics any longer or does that mean that we don't um kind of discuss things in newspapers or or um in
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in other in other ways to try and just analyze what we think is think about it and what happens to human
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language uh and human human discourse in amongst all of this um now i'm not saying that that we're
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necessarily silenced but i think that sometimes what people say they think about something or the
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reasons they give for their feelings need to be taken very seriously particularly where there's some
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kind of injustice involved so sometimes people are not simply just unhappy um or suffering a lack of
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pleasure in the way that bentham might have recognized but they actually have a serious grievance that
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they don't um that they they want to articulate they want to be heard and they want um uh they want
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to hang on to that grievance until it's until it's alleviated in some way um if someone feels that
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there's an injustice in their society to try and reframe that in terms of some kind of neural event or
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some kind of displeasure is a gross misunderstanding of of what that of how that person understands
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themselves and understands their lives and i think that it's that kind of depoliticizing effect of the
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sort of silicon valley um view of the world or the benthamite view of the world that that troubles me
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because we need to grant people the the the power and the authority to carry on saying no this is what
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i think this is how i feel this is this is what i think needs to change in order for me to to change
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my response to it rather than to allow all of those things to become uh in the hands of certain experts
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or those who have the best technology to to monitor our feelings yeah you made an interesting point in the
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book how you're seeing more and more it seems like with this whole emphasis on big big data um it is
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in a lot of ways replacing morality um like it's moral philosophy right um because we can't agree on
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anything uh in our uh in our multicultural um world well we'll just rely on this data to figure out
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what's good what's bad yeah and this is something which in a way that's what that's also what jeremy
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bentham was effectively kind of hoping for i mean obviously in the late 18th century that was a hell
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of a long way off at the time um but over the course of the 20th century the the the the tools and the
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methodologies developed in the in psychology and in the behavioral sciences to to realize or at least
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kind of start to um push towards that that kind of ideal um but one of the interesting things is that
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there's been previous waves of this kind of exuberance there was a there was a wave of of of
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what the in a sense the first era of behaviorism and behaviorism is is a refers to the idea that
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it's possible to um effectively to um to to manage people or govern people or to predict their behavior
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purely by observing them if you can get enough data on on someone then you don't need to actually
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uh kind of go and ask them necessarily ask them any questions or or try and understand them on their
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own terms you can simply kind of collect enough data and then they become um as predictable as
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anything in the natural world so um and there was a the first wave of behaviorism and i talk about
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this a bit in the book was really between around about the time of the first world war in the 1930s
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where you had a whole um various psychologists um you had the world's first management consultant
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frederick taylor and uh huge excitement in the advertising industry that it was going to be
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possible to really get to the bottom of why people buy what they buy and that you wouldn't actually have
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to even give people you know make the products any good you could just sort of kind of manipulate
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people uh purely by uh getting the science right uh now of course this is nonsense and it was
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it kind of started to fall apart over the course of the 1930s and actually the what replaced it or
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what what sort of turned to usurp it was rather more sensitive more um socially conscious um
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things like well there were things like the rise of opinion polling and uh not long after that things
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like focus groups things which actually tried to sort of understand get inside people's worlds a
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little bit more um but then you had another wave of it in the 60s uh with people at bf skinner and
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and famously robert mcnamara thought that the vietnam war could be won purely in a through the
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application of statistics and behavioral principles um and then we're getting another wave now with big
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data and all of this in a way it's this sort of recurring utopia um recurring idealism uh starts
00:25:55.180
with bentham keeps recurring that the way to live we can we can get around thorny dilemmas about how we
00:26:02.180
should live our lives or how we should run our businesses or how we should sell our products
00:26:05.960
whatever it might be purely by consulting the data and i mean if you read some of the big data
00:26:10.020
the more hysterical big data stuff at the moment i mean this is what people are saying is they're
00:26:15.060
saying you know the managers of the future won't have to know the first thing about running a
00:26:19.140
business all they'll have to understand is is is how to um uh feed questions into kind of you know
00:26:25.320
data analytics analytics and all you need is going to have data scientists and uh that all the answers
00:26:30.540
will just come out of that well i mean the first problem with that is employees aren't aren't going to be
00:26:35.720
very happy working in companies where those running the companies effectively view them
00:26:40.340
in this kind of like lab rats um people it matters to people whether or not their voices are heard or
00:26:46.620
not it matters to people whether their um their their autonomy or their humanity really is respected
00:26:53.040
um and situations where people are kind of reduced to data points don't tend to be very happy ones in
00:27:00.540
the long run so there's a kind of a i think something kind of self-defeating about some of this stuff
00:27:04.000
yeah and another thing that troubles me about this whole happiness industry and you you talk about
00:27:08.660
this in the book as well is that there seems to be an encroachment of the market on aspects of our
00:27:14.780
lives that you wouldn't think would have a dollar sign next to it um so relationships your
00:27:21.700
friendships your marriage um even spirituality um these uh businesses uh these researchers are
00:27:29.960
trying to find ways that to optimize that but not optimize it just for for you know because you want
00:27:36.660
to have better friendship but because better friendship can make you happier which will in
00:27:40.280
turn make you a more productive employee yeah i think i mean again it's important to try and
00:27:45.940
disentangle the the good intentions from some of the the negative um applications here and i think
00:27:52.620
that's always the the problem in this area is that um they're always they're always there's always
00:27:57.200
this kind of entanglement of good intentions and some rather more cynical um uses um in terms of the
00:28:03.580
intentions well in a way a lot of the happiness science begins by trying to properly value non-market
00:28:11.360
good so actually one of the things that happiness scientists have been saying since the the 1960s
00:28:17.580
is actually you know we've got to stop we've got to stop putting dollar signs on everything we've got
00:28:21.840
to we've got to we've got to recognize that actually what matters to people is things like spending time
00:28:25.600
in their family having some nice public spaces having green spaces having um you know the thing having
00:28:32.940
time to to do things other than just trying to make more and more money this is actually what a lot of
00:28:37.700
the the research in the happiness uh science suggests uh i think the the and and and you know
00:28:44.340
ultimately a lot of what positive psychology says to people is also in line with that it says you know
00:28:49.780
stop just comparing yourself to everyone else stop trying to um focus on yourself try to notice other
00:28:54.560
people and notice the world around you and think about other people and you know who can be against all
00:28:59.140
of that i think that um the the the problem is that once you start to to measure things and you start
00:29:05.780
to quantify um happiness then of course then it can also be be put to other other uses and there will
00:29:13.100
always be those um who uh look to some of that that research to to try and think about well in that case we
00:29:21.900
need to um you know build in an analysis of things like social relationships and non-market goods into our
00:29:30.640
sales strategy or into our uh employee relations strategy or this sort of thing um and i think that
00:29:37.500
you know the way you take a more um self-centered or a more um a slightly more cutthroat approach to
00:29:46.360
some of that research um you know for instance you know there's all this research showing that if
00:29:52.360
your if your friends are unhappy you're more likely to be unhappy um it's called emotional contagion it was
00:29:57.860
it was partly what facebook were trying to test when they did their their emotional contagion study
00:30:03.060
and uh which was published last year where they were manipulating people's uh news feeds to see if
00:30:07.840
they could spread kind of emotions and across different social networks um but ultimately if you
00:30:15.340
were you know purely focused on your on yourself and on your career or or your your entrepreneurial
00:30:21.020
ventures well you might read lots of this literature and think well i've got to basically start
00:30:25.880
cutting certain people out of my life because they're spreading bad vibes and i've got to um do
00:30:30.800
that in order to be happier because uh there's research showing that being happier is going to make me
00:30:36.400
uh work harder and sleep better and uh make more money and say i think there are not all of it but
00:30:43.060
there are there are areas of this of this agenda which uh um lend themselves to quite a um a an egotistical
00:30:53.060
um uh highly competitive ethos where effectively it's not it's a it's a kind of almost a hoarding
00:31:01.760
of happiness as it can often be or a hoarding of money whereas that is often entangled with these
00:31:06.660
rather more kind of altruistic and generous um approaches so many of which are manifest in things
00:31:11.980
like positive psychology but um it's you know it's there's some good and some bad yeah you're right i
00:31:17.060
mean you see that a lot um amongst like personal development blogs there's tons of them tons of books
00:31:22.180
about that and they they offer these great bits of advice like hang out with your friends you need
00:31:26.560
to get outside more you need to exercise you need to meditate drink water and it's always and it always
00:31:32.140
is like so you can like make more money yeah and and i don't know there's there's some there's a part
00:31:37.420
of me that i guess i'm a romantic um and i like to have something like a greater good like a i and i
00:31:44.240
don't i don't want it just to be about money but it seems like that's what it's all about now
00:31:47.960
yeah i also think data you know i mean there's something very pernicious about data at the
00:31:53.600
moment where everything is everything is quantified and everything is data and it's like i mean i don't
00:31:58.800
doubt that it's true for instance that um spending time with near foliage is good for you i mean this
00:32:06.280
is this is what happiness scientists have shown people do studies that there are studies showing that
00:32:11.320
um the color green has a positive effect on our brains and you know this is why it's good to be
00:32:16.020
knit trees and we should be outside and all this sort of stuff but i think it removes part of the
00:32:20.900
pleasure of going for a walk in a forest if you're if you've got all of that in the back of your house
00:32:26.000
like it's or and it certainly removes the pleasure if you're going for that walk in the forest in order
00:32:32.040
to somehow kind of make some investment in your in your brain or your body um and you know imagine if
00:32:38.800
you were if you were going for a nice walk with with someone else in that situation and you
00:32:43.660
discovered that they were only there because um they they read that it was going to somehow
00:32:47.600
make them more productive the next day or something like that i think you'd you'd feel you'd feel pretty
00:32:52.760
disappointed yeah and i also think the the emphasis on happiness it it uh it it forces us to we we miss
00:33:01.660
out on like the whole human experience like there are benefits to sometimes feeling angry there are
00:33:07.380
benefits of sometimes feeling in a low mood and depressed um but happiness i will know they don't don't do
00:33:12.900
that that is bad you should not feel that way um but i think yeah go ahead i mean i think but this
00:33:18.140
is this is partly i mean go back to jeremy bentham i mean that the requirement of happiness science is
00:33:22.760
always that things can be placed on a scale that's that that things have to go between i mean the nature
00:33:27.560
of the scale varies sometimes it's zero to ten sometimes it's minus five to plus five but it has to
00:33:32.140
you have to put numbers on things rather than attach different words to them so i mean you've you've just
00:33:36.540
mentioned two different words angry and depressed well for happiness scientists uh depressed would have to be a
00:33:41.920
minus five and angry would have to be like a minus two or something you wouldn't be able to see them
00:33:45.880
as as two separate types of things but i often think that one of the one of the most problematic
00:33:52.540
terms that we have i think from a from the perspective of happiness scientists when you say i was moved by
00:33:58.440
something imagine you know when you're moved um by whatever it might be a family experience or going to
00:34:04.200
a theater or something what you know where the hell is that in the when we say that what are we
00:34:08.940
referring to because often we cry often we feel sad but you still feel happy and sad at the same time
00:34:16.060
it doesn't be fit with anything the the it doesn't sort of fit on any scale and yet in a way that's what
00:34:22.760
makes us feel most alive and i think that um in a way that you have to respect the the the capacities
00:34:30.700
of human beings to use language in ways that make sense but don't necessarily uh aren't necessarily
00:34:36.100
reducible to scientific metrics yeah yeah as i was reading your book the the thing that came kept
00:34:42.340
coming back to my mind was brave new world right that was that was i feel like what's going on in a
00:34:49.220
very soft sort of way uh in fact i just got done talking to a psychologist who specializes in humor
00:34:55.720
research and he was discussing how uh big pharma is now tickling mice um to figure out the benefits
00:35:04.760
of laughing yeah on on mammalian brains in order to develop a pill that can you take it you will feel
00:35:11.640
happy i mean it's like soma um like real life soma and that to me is somewhat troubling i don't know
00:35:18.080
well i mean i think one key part of this which we haven't touched on is um antidepressants which of
00:35:25.460
course um i argue in the book that in a way antidepressants transform the whole notion of
00:35:33.300
happiness and the whole notion of unhappiness in ways that i think reach far further than just the
00:35:40.160
the you know the the the psych the psychiatry or the pharmaceutical industry or those who happen to
00:35:44.600
take pills because in a way when antidepressants were were discovered in the late 1950s they weren't
00:35:50.540
kind of properly commercialized until the 1980s but when they were discovered it completely changed
00:35:55.340
how initially scientists but later cult more more culturally more generally uh people would conceive
00:36:02.440
of things like mood because the idea that mood is something that is rooted in your in your physical
00:36:08.020
being would have been pretty wouldn't have really made a lot of sense until antidepressants were
00:36:13.780
discovered at that time i mean there were psychiatrists who argued this but they were pretty
00:36:17.680
marginal um and i think um the idea that it's possible to change our feelings by changing our
00:36:23.980
our bodies or in particular our brains um is partly a symptom of a of a of a culture in which
00:36:30.080
antidepressants have have become um so pervasive or at least so so culturally significant um that's not
00:36:37.280
to say that mood doesn't have physical dimensions to it clearly it does i mean i'm not i'm not denying
00:36:43.480
whole bodies of of of research but i think um i think one of the one of the again it's important
00:36:50.280
to distinguish between something which is a symptom uh from something which is a broader cause or the
00:36:56.080
broader meaning of a term um so depression has certain symptoms such as kind of inability to sleep or
00:37:02.900
um inability to um uh or sleeping too much or whatever it might be um and often what happens with
00:37:11.120
um the medical approach to these things is that it starts to folk they start to focus too much on
00:37:17.320
on particular physical symptoms um and the whole question of of of how someone came to feel in a certain
00:37:23.120
way starts to drop out of out of the equation and in terms of your example of of tickling mice
00:37:28.320
um one of the i think one of the the most troubling uh areas in all of this which comes out of
00:37:35.600
neuroscience again and areas of of neuroeconomics and this sort of thing is you get research which
00:37:42.980
shows that the very act of smiling has triggers certain neurological um activities which make you
00:37:52.040
feel better so that some of the um gurus of neuroscience i'm not necessarily talking about the
00:37:57.940
the people who are doing the the research in universities and elsewhere but some of the the people
00:38:03.140
who turn it into the positive thinking mantras and the business books and so on will say well in that
00:38:07.780
case you've got to just exercise your mouth you've got to turn the corners of your mouth up certain
00:38:11.700
times a day it's like a sort of exercise like um like you know uh doing yoga or going to the gym or
00:38:17.340
something because this way you're going to keep this the right chemicals um flowing around your brain
00:38:22.080
now again i mean i don't question that this i don't question the science i'm not qualified to do so
00:38:27.640
but i think we have to question what that means culturally uh if people are being encouraged to
00:38:34.080
do what effectively is a is a is a is a insincere act purely with a view to try and look after their
00:38:40.620
serotonin levels or whatever it might be or their career so happiness fascism well i i didn't say i
00:38:48.840
know it's not a term that i use but yeah but i mean the the the i mean various people have pointed out
00:38:54.280
the the um echoes of a brave new world and i think that you know i think the the problem is
00:39:00.040
it's not this stuff doesn't work i think just like in brave new world it's the it's possibly the problem
00:39:03.960
is that it that it works too well and and and what do we lose in the process so this all uh you know
00:39:09.780
leads to the question like what do we do with this right um so we have this uh research we have this
00:39:14.280
technology i mean it seems like you've been hinting that there there possibly is a role for it in our
00:39:19.840
life but how do we figure out that balance it's very difficult and i think that a lot of the the
00:39:28.380
trends of of pulling us further in this direction particularly with technology at the moment
00:39:33.100
i think the sorts of things that i i think would would be um provide an alternative in the future
00:39:41.020
although i'm not uh holding my breath that this is going to happen in time soon
00:39:44.660
is to start to try and bring back in a kind of institutional logic so to return my example of
00:39:50.660
of schools from earlier um think look at some of the the evidence on on on depression and anxiety and
00:39:58.100
stress amongst young people and think about how you would um design and run schools differently
00:40:04.420
uh in ways that allowed people to flourish because after all i mean i'm not in the book i'm not against
00:40:10.840
happiness i'm not against flourishing i think in a way we need to get back to
00:40:13.720
some of the early more idealistic um era of of of the happiness um uh science or happiness
00:40:20.560
agenda in a way um but ultimately we people what people need to be to be happy you know in a you know
00:40:27.160
in a more authentic sense or in a less um kind of manipulated sense is to um stop looking into
00:40:36.060
themselves stop seeing all the sources of their feelings as somehow internal to themselves so i think
00:40:40.980
that actually um we need to um stop blaming our own brains our own selves or whatever it might be
00:40:47.860
for the way we feel um and in a way we need kind of less science if we if that's possible i mean i
00:40:54.240
don't think it's difficult to imagine but less less science of the brain or the self or behavior of the
00:40:59.180
feelings and more uh uh experiments i suppose in different ways of living different ways of
00:41:06.320
running institutions which might allow people uh to be to to to spend less time worrying about
00:41:12.000
themselves less less time comparing themselves to other people which after all is what a lot of
00:41:16.120
positive psychology also suggests i think ultimately there are deep lying philosophical contradictions
00:41:23.520
and happiness agenda i think that once you reach the point where a scientist or a manager or a or a
00:41:29.900
or a market researcher claims to know how someone else is feeling without that person even being
00:41:36.820
consulted in any way purely on a on a um on a kind of um you know purely sort of quantitative scientific
00:41:44.660
sense i think that they're beginning to miss something about that person i think this this this
00:41:49.560
this sort of a certain type of rebellion against that kind of big data uh high surveillance behavior
00:41:55.180
behaviorism uh will happen at some point exactly how it manifests itself i think remains to be seen
00:42:00.860
interesting well will davies where can people learn more about your work well i have a blog at
00:42:06.820
potlatch.org.uk um i uh i am on twitter at davis underscore will um and you can read my book the
00:42:16.800
happiness industry i will davies thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure great thank you
00:42:21.520
very much my guest today was william davies he's the author of the book the happiness industry how
00:42:25.540
the government and big business sold us well-being and you can find that on amazon.com and bookstores
00:42:29.700
everywhere well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips
00:42:37.300
and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you
00:42:41.220
enjoy this podcast i'd really appreciate it if you give us a review on itunes or stitcher
00:42:45.280
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